The Concise Dictionary of Dress

In this collaboration between a psychoanalyst and a costume curator, Adam Phillips re-describes dress in terms of anxiety, wish and desire. His definitions for words we associate with fashion and appearance are paired with installations by Judith Clark secreted amongst the Victoria & Alberts vast reserve collections at Blythe House in west London. In this deeply idiosyncratic book, says Phillips, a dictionary of language and installation plays off information against evocation, getting it right against the gorgeous eccentricity of personal association. Offering multiple definitions for each word, Phillips broadens the scope for our interpretation and questions the precise nature of what indeed constitutes a definition. And in his lengthy introduction to this book, Phillips also assesses what dictionaries are, how we use them and why they matter. Clark herself presents a written analysis of her installations in answers to questions posed anonymously to her by authorities in fields as varied as cultural theory, fashion history, arts curation, neuroscience and psychogeography. In addition to the texts by Phillips and Clark and a catalogue of the works exhibited, The Concise Dictionary of Dress replicates the visitors hourlong journey through Blythe House in a book-length photo-essay, a personal tour that is as individual in its perspective as the work itself.